Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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military and the old guard led by

Ismet

u, the leader of the opposition

RPP, played a large part in its determination to cling to power, which hastened

the 1960 intervention.

The Turkish right and the maintenance of the anti-political

guardianship role

Traditional hostility between the successors of the DP and the military, both in

emotive terms and also in a genuine struggle for power, should not obscure a

major feature of the historical maintenance of the TAF’s guardian role: during

much of the multi-party era, the military actions of the bureaucracy have not

been prompted by fear of a challenge to its guiding role from the political left.

Instead, it has acted on the well-founded belief that the principal threat to its

prerogatives and privileged position is a centre-right government with strong

enough popular support to enable it to challenge the TAF’s role and build on

a power base that would shift the balance in favour of civilian authority.

However, centre-right, centre-left and ultra-right political ideologies and

movements in the Republic have frequently ratiﬁed the military’s decisions

and, to varying degrees, supported the military elite’s deﬁnition of the ‘enemy’

and the strategies to ﬁght against it: ‘communism’ during the Cold War;

‘reactionary Islam’ and ‘Kurdish’ separatism in the post-Cold War times. In

theory, the only time centre-right forces could have presented a real threat to

the ‘rules of the game’ was in the post-1980 period, when the modernism of the

new right articulated a religious dimension to Turkish identity. Some tensions

arose between the two sides during the ﬁrst Gulf War, but on the whole, the

military welcomed and supported the new Turkish–Islamic synthesis because

it believed that this ideology strengthened national unity and social solidarity,

eased the dislocations caused by the full liberalisation of Turkish capitalism

and defused potential opposition by the left.

The relationship between the

neo-conservative civilian elite and the military rested on an open-ended set

of arrangements whereby civilians managed politics by technical solutions,

worked within the post-1980 institutional framework and implicitly agreed

not to question the role of the military.

39 George Harris, ‘The Causes of the 1960 Revolution in Turkey’, Middle East Journal 24

(1970), p. 449.

40 Dankwart Rustow, ‘Transition to democracy’, in Heper and Evin (eds.), State, Democracy

and the Military.

41 Kemal Karpat, ‘Military interventions: army–civilian relations in Turkey before and after

1980’, in Heper and Evin (eds.), State, Democracy and the Military,p.156.

314

The Turkish military

After the military intervention in 1960 the JP, the successor to the DP,

became the dominant party of the centre-right. In the 1960s the JP challenged

the military by emphasising political freedoms, demanding an amnesty for the

imprisoned and politically banned politicians of the DP, and by continuously

stressing the ‘national will’ over the military’s will in order to develop a power

base from the ruined image of the DP. However, the military beneﬁted from the

fact that neither the DP nor the JP was unambiguously committed to political

and economic liberalism. As parties of the rural periphery, their existence

depended on the most signiﬁcant cleavage within the existing power balance,

that between the central bureaucratic elite and the rural periphery. The appeal

of both parties ‘was not ideological but...rooted in the social structure of

Turkey’.

Political and economic liberalism had only limited relevance for

this core constituency of small peasants and rising urban commercial groups.

They were organically linked to the state by statist subsidies and protections.

More signiﬁcantly, the tension between the Western/European and

other/Islamic facets of Turkish national identity had not yet reached the stage

of an open contestation about who was a genuine ‘Turk’. Certainly, the 1960s

and 1970s show that ‘Europeanisation’ and secularism were not limited aspi-

rations during the Cold War, although the anti-communist ideology of the

state further reinforced the conservatism of the periphery. Until the 1980s,

the rising Turkish bourgeoisie wanted freedom from the straitjacket of state

bureaucracy, not necessarily a liberal state per se. In sum, the DP and JP voiced

popular resentment against the state in a basically pro-state discourse.

As a

result, containment and cooptation of peripheral elements through Turkey’s

centre-right forces within a Westernist/secularist frame reinforced the mili-

tary’s traditional role and prerogatives and the integrative power of the state.

The military has written increasingly authoritarian constitutions after each

intervention to alter the formulation of public policy and the relationship

between state and society in favour of a political system comprising its own

values.

The liberal character of post-1960 restructuring of political and social

life may seem an aberration at ﬁrst, but it can best be understood if put into

perspective: American military aid and the modernisation of the army ofﬁcer

corps fostered a growing interest in social and political affairs, which then

surpassed that of the civilian ethos of the DP government.

The commander

42 W. B. Sherwood, ‘The Rise of the Justice Party in Turkey’, World Politics 20 (1968), p. 55.

Umit Cizre Sakallıo

glu, ‘Liberalism, Democracy and the Turkish Center-Right: The

Identity Crisis of the True Path Party’, Middle Eastern Studies 32 (April 1996).

44 Semih Vaner, ‘The army’, p. 238.

45 Lerner and Robinson, ‘Swords and Ploughshares’, p. 41.

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of the War College, Talat Aydemir, who made two failed coup attempts in 1962

and 1963, explains the politisation of the military in his memoirs: according to

him, while the education system in military schools was archaic and repressive

until 1949–50, from that date onwards the staff ofﬁcers were trained in a more

liberal American system, which increased their technical professionalism as

well as intellectual capacity. In the 1960s the insecurity and uncertainty of the

JP, which suffered from factionalism within the party, rising social turmoil,

ideological fragmentation in the system, weak authority and its status as the

successor party of the DP, also increased the military’sbias against the civilians.

The return to competitive politics after the 1980 intervention, on the other

hand, was shaped by the intention to avoid the destructive instability of the

past, which,the generals believed, was caused by self-interested political actors.

The military rulers (1980–3) and the ruling party from 1983 to 1991, the Moth-

erland Party (Anavatan Partisi, MP), altered the social bases of politics, the

institutional framework for party competition

and undermined the power

of the old parties and political class. Globally induced electoral trends also

found their way into Turkey with the increasing personalisation of political

representation by individual leaders, expressed by the rise in the ‘personal vote’

or the ‘Americanisation of political competition’. This development put a pre-

mium on the personal image of the prime minister, reinforcing the already

undemocratic malaise of leader-based parties.

It is also important to underscore that as a result of the depth of the state’s

crisis in 1970, the armed forces had greater autonomy from social forces in 1980

than had been the case in previous interventions. The shift to economic liber-

alism was predicated on the creation of a socially disciplined and depoliticised

society. In other words, the military and its political successors promoted eco-

nomic liberalism through a conservative-authoritarian political agenda that

narrowed the bases of political participation, banned the existing political

leaders, parties and venues, strengthened state institutions and expanded the

TAF’s political privileges constitutionally. This process entailed a new phase

of modernisation and entry into the global economy and politics.

The adoption of the neo-liberal agenda caused a convergence in the polit-

ical debate and led to a sterility of alternative ideas and values. The 1980

intervention was one fundamental source of today’s disconnection between

state and society. By the end of the 1980s, the coup had created its own loyal

clientele: there was now a sizeable and complex middle class that accepted

Ilter Turan, ‘Political parties and the party system in post-1983 Turkey’, in Heper and

Evin (eds.), State, Democracy and the Military.

316

The Turkish military

economic neo-liberalism, opted for an individualistic and hedonistic lifestyle

and regarded any form of the social state as pathological. Apart from frown-

ing at overt military intervention, however, the new middle classes were not

critical of the political presence and role of the military. This acceptance of the

military’s role suggests that one reason why civilian governments have consis-

tently acceded to the TAF’s deﬁnition of the rules of politics is the diminished

potential of the public sphere to create alternative ideas, energy and creativ-

ity in searching for new ways in which the state–society–citizen nexus can

be made responsive to new needs, aspirations and hallmarks of democracy.

This complacency, in turn, further contributes to the difﬁculty of establishing

effective civilian actors in politics.

During the 1980s and 1990s, while Turgut

Ozal, former leader of the MP,

emulated the global trend of shifting emphasis from party competition to

‘effective governance’, the right wing was not able to form a coalition capable

of inhibiting the formal or informal political inﬂuence of the military. While the

ideological background of the left was more democracy friendly, the tradition

of the JP and its successor, the True Path Party (Do

gru Yol Partisi, TPP), was

more supportive of a conservative and illiberal state. Therefore, attitudinal and

legal shifts in post-1980 Turkey brought to the fore the tensions, limitations,

contradictions and fault-lines of the Turkish right, as much as those on the

left.

The restrictive provisions of the 1982 constitution, which emphasised ‘the

consolidation of the democratic authority of the state,’ were essentially in

tune with the pre-1980 JP line. Until the rise of Tansu C¸ iller (1993–2002), the

successor of Demirel as the leader of the TPP, the JP–TPP tradition adopted

a double-discourse policy on civilian–military relations: on the one hand, the

leadership basically followed a conciliatory line towards military involvement

in politics, but at certain crisis junctures, when civil–military relations were

at a low ebb, the leadership made feeble efforts to reassert a discourse of

supremacy of the parliament and primacy of the popular will.

Demirel, who since 1964 had seen three interventions, remained prepared to

make strategic compromises with the military. His whole career was based on

an extremely skilful balancing act between the two dimensions of this historical

double-discourse. The best example comes from his days in opposition in

the 1980s: in calling for greater democratisation, he emphasised anti-militarist

ideas,the rule of law and expansion of political participation. Thisanti-militarist

Umit Cizre Sakallıo

glu, ‘The Anatomy of the Turkish Military’s Political Autonomy’,

Comparative Politics 29 ( January 1997), p. 155.

317

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stance and rhetoric was the most radical any mainstream political party had

adopted in Turkey, because it openly questioned the constitutional role of

the NSC and expressed concern over the changed power relations between

the armed forces and the political class. The party hierarchy demanded the

establishment of the principle of civilian control over the military. The MP was

portrayed as ‘the emanation of the coup . . . using . . . the political inﬂuence

of the military for furthering its political fortunes’.

In 1990, while he was still in opposition, Demirel demanded a reorganisation

of civil–military relations to establish civilian control over the military.

But

two years later, when he was the prime minister, he permitted a bill placing

the chief of general staff under the minister of defence

to be defeated by the

votes of his party members in the parliamentary committee on defence.

The

same bill was again defeated eight months later in the same committee by the

same deputies.

Tansu C¸ iller approached the military differently, departing from the tradi-

tional line of the party with her adoption of a more consistent discourse.

Abandoning any pretence of reasserting civilian supremacy, C¸ iller praised the

armed forces, as she was reluctant to risk the military’s reaction and upset the

status quo. She also hoped to score a political victory on the Kurdish issue by

defeating the uprising by military means. C¸ iller explained her policy thus: ‘We

were accused of governing by leaning on to the military . . . Which politician

and political party in any country has come to power by bickering with its own

army?’

Indeed, when in August 1993 and 1994 the question of the appoint-

ment of the general chief of staff arose, C¸ iller refrained from undertaking any

48 S

uleyman Demirel, T

urk demokrasisi meydan okuyor: DYP genel bas¸kani Suleyman Demirel’

in 1989 mali yılı b

utc¸esi vesilesi ile TBMM’de yaptı

gı konus¸malar (Ankara: DYP Basın ve

Propaganda Bas¸kanlı

gı, n. d.), p. 133.

49 S

uleyman Demirel, ‘12 Eyl

ul vaadleri tutulmadı’, Milliyet, 28 May 1990. Demirel, in this

interview with an Istanbul daily, openly stated: ‘In Turkey, the place of the chief of

general staff is, in fact, above the minister of defence. Is Turkey a military republic? . . .

The place of the chief of general staff should in fact be below the minister of defence . . .

In which country in the world does the chief of general staff see [the] president every

week and brief him?’

50 The issue of the chief of general staff being accountable to the minister of defence,

rather than the prime minister, is of great signiﬁcance in Turkey for those advocating

the establishment of liberal democracy along the lines suggested by the EU and those

who see this type of division of authority as indicative of subordination of the military

to the civilian authority along Western lines.

51 Cizre, ‘Ruler to Pariah’, p. 88.

52 See H

urriyet, 15 January 1993.

Umit Cizre, ‘Tansu C¸ iller: Lusting for power and undermining democracy’, in M. Heper

and S. Sayarı (eds.), Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey (Lanham, Boulder, New

York and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002), p. 203.

54 Ibid.

318

The Turkish military

initiative that would displease the high command, and endorsed the wishes of

the hierarchy on the issue. Do

gan G

ures¸, the chief of staff she chose, and who

was later elected as deputy on the TPP ticket in 1995, reiterated the harmony

between C¸ iller and the armed forces: ‘The prime minister acted like a tiger,

the armed forces liked it. I worked with ease with all the prime ministers, with

Ozal, Akbulut, Yılmaz and Demirel. But with C¸ iller I worked with even more

ease.’

As a result, critical policy choices and initiatives on fundamental questions

such as the Kurdish issue have been hampered by right-wing governments’

legacy of legitimising the status quo and therefore reinforcing the skewed

equilibrium in civil–military relations in the military’s favour.

The military and civilian protagonists of the 1997 intervention saw the roots

of reactionary Islam in the ‘irresponsible’ use of Islam for partisan purposes

by the political class. They therefore attempted to marginalise the forces of

political Islam by disciplining representative institutions, strengthening the

centre-right and centre-left and implementing security-minded policies in

the public. They were not interested in the promotion of regime capabil-

ities through more effective governance, political legitimacy and expanded

democracy.

Their logic was guided by the rationale that structural changes

could be introduced without any corresponding transformation in political

ideas. However, their restructuring of the political system only served to

bring out the state-friendly and state-dependent features of centre-left and

centre-right parties and to stiﬂe their vision, creativity and appeal.

Both

left and right became preoccupied with preserving the status quo and failed

to generate any new, forward-looking ideas.

The establishment’s single-

minded concern with securing the country against potential threats origi-

nating from Islamism and Kurdish nationalism stiﬂed public debate on key

issues, and led the existing political class to subcontract the resolution of

crucial problems to the civil–military bureaucracy.

In sum, all political per-

suasions adopted a new rendition of the ‘politics of inertia’, a politics that was

characterised by ‘the absence of political synergy or a credible parliamentary

alternative, and the ofﬁcials’ abject disregard for the concerns of those they

represent’.

55 Cizre, ‘Ruler to pariah’, p. 92.

56 Cizre and C¸ ınar, ‘Turkey 2002’, p. 316.

57 Ibid., pp. 316–17.

58 Ibid., p. 318.

59 Menderes C¸ ınar, ‘Mission Impossible’, Private View 2, 5 (1997), p. 76.

60 Cizre and C¸ inar, ‘Turkey 2002’, p. 318.

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The roadmap for Turkey’s entry to the EU, drawn at the Helsinki European

Council’s meeting on 10–11 December 1999, has forced the heirs of the 28th

February process to dilute their ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality towards Islam in pol-

itics. Pitting the rhetoric of ‘contemporary life’, which in Turkey is associated

with Western secularism, against the opposite imagery of ‘Islamic anachro-

nism’ was one way for Ankara to endorse Western values. In the post-Helsinki

era, there was also a shift of discourse on the part of the military establishment

to an ‘argumentative rationality’ when engaged with its domestic and inter-

national critics over accusations of democracy and human rights violations.

Rather than denying the violations of democratic norms, the argumentative

discourse afﬁrmed the democratic deﬁciency in Turkey’s political life, but

tried to justify the suspension and limitation of democratic rights and norms

on the grounds that as part of the military’s campaign against internal ene-

mies, particularly Kurdish insurgents, these measures were ‘exceptional’ and

‘corrective’.

However, since the 11 September attacks, the Turkish general staff has moved

towards a more conservative-nationalist position with regard to Ankara’s ful-

ﬁlment of the EU’s Copenhagen Criteria. The high command is of the opinion

that the conditions for fulﬁlling democracy are ‘compromises’, and as such

they are too high a price to pay for being included in a bloc which displays a

negative bias towards Turkey and will therefore create barriers to accession.

Tuncer Kılınc¸, former secretary general of the NSC, told an audience at the

Ankara War Academy in early March 2002 that ‘the EU will never accept

Turkey ...Thus,Turkey needs new allies, and it would be useful if Turkey

engages in a search that would include Russia and Iran.’

The military and the Justice and Development Party:

continuing or breaking the modus vivendi with the right

The moderate Islamist JDP’s election victory in November 2002 reafﬁrmed

the military’s perception of political Islam as an internal security threat. But

the JDP drew a critical lesson from the failed coalitions of the 1990s, and as a

result sought to change the status quo via efﬁcient performance on the basis of

two positions: ﬁrst, a discursive denial of its Islamist pedigree and the adoption

61 See Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘The socialization of international human rights

norms into domestic practices: ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and

Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), The Power of Human Rights, International Norms and Domestic

Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 2–3.

62 See Jon Gorvett, ‘Turkish Military ﬁres warning shot over EU membership,’ The Middle

East 323 (May 2002), p. 33.

320

The Turkish military

of a moderate and non-religious discourse in its place; and second, securing

Turkish inclusion in the EU not just as a reform strategy, but also as a way of

transforming the domestic power balance.

With the EU accession process in mind, the government’s reform packages

since November 2002 have included the expansion of freedom of expression;

the abolition of the death penalty and anti-terrorism provisions that authorised

punishment for verbal propaganda against the unity of state; the provision of

retrial rights for citizens whose court decisions are overthrown by the Euro-

pean Court of Human Rights; permission for education and broadcasting in

the Kurdish language; and some softening of the intransigence of Turkish for-

eign policy towards the Cyprus question. The sheer volume and speed of the

reforms, as well as the consensus of support behind them, have helped change

the popular perception of civilian governments as underachieving, unsta-

ble and corrupt. More signiﬁcantly, through a number of deliberate policies,

the ruling party has tried to create enough elbow room to make decisions free

from the tutelary control of the military. This process, in turn, has increased its

ability to initiate pro-civilian reforms in spite of disquiet amongst the secular

establishment.

As the JDP government has included in its political reform agenda the

alteration of the existing system of civil–military relations, the TAF has been

provoked into upholding its ‘guardianship’ mission, because it has continued

to regard the government’s discourse and true intentions with deep suspicion.

The global reshaping of the world after the Cold War has had two contra-

dictory policy implications for the Turkish military’s role in public life: ﬁrst,

the explosion of military-deﬁned internal security threats has encouraged the

tendency for more security, less democracy and more vigilance from the TAF.

In the 1990s, there was an increase in laws pertaining to internal security, anti-

terrorism and the maintenance of public order. These laws criminalise certain

political activities,constrain publicdebate and expand military jurisdiction over

civilians. However, second, partly as a backlash to these repressive measures,

partly under the ﬁrm impetus of the idea of entry into the EU, an impressive

movement towards internalisation of European political values has dramati-

cally increased the costs of ‘more security’. This development has prompted

reform and the scaling down of the TAF’s political inﬂuence.

Of the democratic reforms that Turkey has undertaken, none are more

important and controversial than those related to the Turkish military’s power

and autonomy in the 2000s. The democratic reform package of July 2003,

which was formally put into effect on 7 August 2003, shows that the current

military–civil equation in Turkey is characterised by greater dynamism than

321

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expectations of historical–cultural continuity in the civil–military relationship

would allow. The package contained an amendment to some articles of the Act

on the National Security Council and the General Secretariat of the NSC that

tipped the balance of power in favour of civilian leadership. The August 2003

laws are a distinct legislative accomplishment by historical standards because

the political role of the military has been based on the NSC, an institution long

considered to be ‘the shadow government’.

The reforms not only repealed

the NSC’s executive powers and turned it into an advisory body, they also

increased the number of civilian members to a majority.

From many perspectives, the August 2003 package of laws, also called the 7th

Harmonisation Package, has compelling political and theoretical signiﬁcance

for the civil–military power equation. By converting the NSC into an advisory

body that has little effective inﬂuence over national policy,the AKP government

knowingly took the risk of a confrontation with the military leadership. This

step showed that the government now felt itself to be in a secure enough

position to establish civilian supremacy. The 8th Harmonisation Package,

passed on 21 May 2004, further increased civilian oversight over the defence

budget and removed military representatives from the Council on Higher

Education (Y

uksek

gretim Kurumu, Y

OK) and the Supreme Board of Radio

and Television (Radyo Televizyon

Ust Kurumu, RT

UK). It also abolished state

security courts, which tried crimes against the state, a legacy of the period

after the 1980 military coup.

Finally, the amendments narrowed the right

of military courts to try civilians for criticising the military. The government

is also planning to increase the parliamentary oversight of defence spending

in 2006, and has taken some steps in involving itself in the preparation of

the latest national security policy document. These developments do not

signal a total retreat of the military from politics, even along with the by-

law of 8 January 2005 that made the NSC’s operation non-secret. But the most

63 Foreign Minister Abdullah G

ul used the term in a speech he made in New York. See

‘MGK G

olge H

umeti’, Milliyet, 29 September 2004.

64 Established in 1982 and commencing operations in 1984, the state security courts have

been civilianised since June 1999 after the European Court of Human Rights ruled

in 1998 that its composition of one military judge with two civilians was against the

European conventions. To prevent criticism of the trial of Abdullah

Ocalan, the PKK

leader, the military judge sitting on the bench was removed and replaced with a civilian

one. The EU Commission’s Regular Reports have repeatedly speciﬁed that the powers

and proceedings of these courts be brought more in line with EU standards. The ﬁrst

round of democratisation reforms passed by parliament on 6 February 2002 dealt with

the issue only procedurally by reducing the custody period for crimes tried in the state

security courts. The scope of its functions is transferred to the criminal courts that are

being set up.

322

The Turkish military

important platform through which the military’s inﬂuence is exercised and

reproduced has deﬁnitely been curtailed.

The military’s partial retreat from the political arena is explained not only by

the requirements of the EU membership, but also by the strategic environment

that arose in the aftermath of 11 September and the 2003 Iraq war. In this

environment, international sympathy and support for the moderate Islam-

identiﬁed government of Turkey is not at all irreconcilable with the prevailing

moral sensibility that characterises international politics. This new state of

affairs resonates well with the long-held Turkish aspiration of being European

in a region of ‘backward’ religious beliefs, poverty, underdevelopment and

democratic shortfall. As the historian Kemal Karpat puts it, Turkey is probably

‘the only nation to have turned modernity into [its] national religion’.

Thus

the relationship is mutually advantageous, because Turkey is both useful to

the West and has ‘a vision of the future anchored in the West’.

As a result

of the situation, the JDP government does not have to try hard to ingratiate

itself with the West. The strategic change in the region has accomplished that

task.

But what makes this argument complicated is that the Turkish military

is not at all amenable to the idea of a secular regime in a culturally Muslim

country providing ‘a good example for other countries in the region’.

The

Turkish regime has always taken an ambiguous position with regard to the

country’s identity and connections to the Islamic world. Indeed, the regime

refuses to deﬁne Turkish identity in terms of religion or to countenance any

public role for Islam. But its deﬁnition of a secular identity is also open to

debate: those who view Turkey from a critical perspective doubt the country’s

secular credentials and claim that it has a laicist system of ‘domination and

control of religion by the state at nearly all levels’.

The factors that enhance Turkey’s political value in the eyes of the West are

in fact rejected by the military: a former deputy chief of general staff, General

Ilker Bas¸bu

g, defends a causal link between secularism and democracy, and

therefore assumes that since Turkey is secular, it is also democratic. In his

mind, it is false to juxtapose Islam and secularism: ‘It can be misleading to

claim that countries with a predominantly Muslim population could adopt a

65 Kemal Karpat, ‘Turkey’s long journey to Europe’, newsvote.bbc.co.uk/impapps/

pagetools/the (4 January 2005), BBC News.

66 Ibid.

67 Commission of the European Communities, ‘Commission Staff Working Document,

Issues Arising from Turkey’s Membership Perspective’, Brussels, October 2004,p.11.

68 Graham Fuller, ‘Turkey’s Strategic Model: Myths and Realities’, Washington Quarterly

27, 3 (2004), p. 52.

323